Asher Jay: Art as a Weapon

Artist and activist Asher Jay uses creative concepts and striking designs to underscore the dire consequences of wildlife trafficking in her fight against the illegal trade.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Asher Jay: Art as a Weapon

Artist and activist Asher Jay uses creative concepts and striking designs to underscore the dire consequences of wildlife trafficking in her fight against the illegal trade.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Asher: So I want to start with two questions. How do you connect to the wild, and when do you connect to the wild? My relationship with the wild began as a child with something as simple as a smile. The smile that you see on my face right now is not the one that I had as a kid. Where you see incisors, I once had fangs. This led me to believe I was a bat. I would run about the house with a cape tied to my neck and my hands pretending I could fly. I'm sorry to say that I never took off. One of the many disappointments of childhood, things that you learn your limitations. Few years later, I remember reading this article about fruit bats, and a large number of them are being consumed by the thousands in Guam, and being shipped from the Pacific Islands to Guam. This is a commercial outfit. To think that somebody would want to consume something that I had been not too long ago, was kind of shocking. It really did not resonate with me, and I figured I needed to do something about that at some point in my life. But I didn't think to start then, which I should have, and I'm always amazed by people who start early because it's never too early to start. If you're reacting to something, do something right then and there. Don't wait for tomorrow, don't wait for another day, don't wait to become something. You're already everything you need to be to act.

Anyhow, so going forward, eventually I found my way back into conservation which I'm really grateful for, and I wound up dealing with numerous species through numerous non-profit outfits. For me wild is an implicit part of who I am, and how I function daily. It is part of our biological and evolutionary development, it is a part of our lineage, it's where we come from. It is our past, it is in our present, and it should jolly well be a part of our future, and that is why I do what I do because it is so important to me to evoke this connection that I feel on a cellular level in every individual I encounter every day. It led me to dealing with ivory and rhino horn, and all of last year went by just tackling this one issue, and trying to tell the same story over and over again in as many ways as possible.

These were campaigns for Elephant Voices, Joyce Poole's organization, dealing with poaching in Kenya. This particular campaign was supposed to cast a light on what's happening with the Chinese consumer market being the largest stakeholder in this game. It is a numbers game. It is about tipping points, money and time. And time is running out at the cost of these animals. This particular campaign shows these two Chinese characters which spells China in Chinese, Zhongguo, and beneath that I've written Stop the trade. Every toss costs a life. This got Joyce thrown out of a TCM Conference, Traditional Chinese Medicine Conference, and she called me panicked, being, Oh my gosh, I can't believe it had such a huge outcry that I had to be basically evicted from the premises. She said, I don't know whether this was a good thing, but after a lot of debate we realized it was a good thing because shortly after, we started getting e-mails with images like this. This was the less shocking image. I got e-mails with people who had tattooed this onto their backs and arms. I was surprised that a single artwork that I created could have such deep impact on people's lives that they felt like it could extend their voice and empower who they were and what they stood for in the world.

We started running these campaigns as open source. Anybody could print them out and use them any which way they felt was appropriate to get the story out there. There were demonstrations completely decentralized, organized by students, schools, and non-profits around the world, all carrying banners. There were banners hanging outside people's houses, as bumper stickers in cars. I would get images daily sent in, and it was really quite lovely to see that these images could really have such a strong reach across the world. Which led me to finding ways to communicate the same story in as many media as possible, as well as to tell every angle of the story.

So this is to cast a light on the terror attacks and the trade in firearms because illicit contraband does contribute to that. It's almost important to educate the Chinese demographic about how each tusk or rhino horn costs a life; it does result in death. Most Chinese people believe that the elephant tusk is like a tooth, it just falls out and it's picked up by somebody and delivered to the marketplace. I needed to show this in a way, in places where loads of eyes would have access to these images. We ran these on mass transport systems in China, as well as on consumer magazines in partnership with WildAid, African Wildlife Foundation, and Save Our Elephants. Because we want to target people who had the purchasing power, who could have immediate impact on what was happening on the fields. Because when you kill the demand, when you stop the buying, it stops the killing. It's not just important to educate people about what's happening, but also to cast light on cultural consciousness and shift perspectives that are held for extended periods of time and get those people to extend the empathy that they feel toward one thing toward the other thing.

Moving from the known to the unknown. These two campaigns which were run across China in a similar format on mass transport, as well as on billboards and magazines, were to help the Chinese extend this pride that they feel in the conservation success that they've achieved with pandas in China to African wildlife hence The pandas of Africa. It was run in a vocabulary they understood, and it went viral in China which was a tremendous success because it was tweeted on Weibo and in all the local social media. The Chinese adopted it as their own message because it was not targeting them and singling them out. Instead it was showing them, “You've done something well, extend that positive attitude towards something else.”

For me, I'm haunted by this crisis. My dating life is kind of ruined by it because... ...frankly when I go out on a date with a stranger, I'm thinking all the while about the one that's lost every fifteen minutes. By the time we get to dessert I'm like, Is this guy worth six elephants? When you're weighing it like that, it's very hard to sit through that evening. It also ends up affecting me during my sleep cycle, it ruins my REM cycle continually. Or sometimes I actually end up strategizing solutions and taking notes. I always sleep with an iPhone by my bed, or a notebook because I never know when a sketch is going to occur to me. Not to mention bathroom breaks. If I wake up in the middle of the night, and this was one particular situation, is a sequence that actually unfolded one evening.

I woke up at three in the morning, I went to the loo, sat down, and as I'm peeing I'm looking out the door, and I see a tile on the floor - tree rings in this wooden tile. And I'm immediately thinking about geological time and about the Giant Sequoia that I first encountered as a child in the British Natural History Museum. About how these species encompass our stories and assimilate us in such a profound way. This particular sequoia ring started out its life in 557. From there, moving forward, it has assimilated the rise of Islam, spread of Christianity, it has seen so much down to the birth and death of Gandhi. When we cut a tree like that down, we're cutting this huge part of our history down. So when a species goes extinct it's not just about that one individual species that's going off our radar, but about the fact that this huge part of our story has just gone missing. And that is such a terrible loss to me. Immediately I got to the desk, didn't go back to bed, started sketching out a rhino, juxtaposing this tree ring into it, and then trying to find ways in which I can show how time is lapsing for the species. The primary horn became a sand timer, but a blood timer so every drop that falls is adding to that narrative of loss. The secondary horn is a metronome with a AK-47 going back and forth, keeping count. The eye of the rhino has a clock that reads a second before midnight because if you compress geological time into twenty four hours, we came onto this planet a second before midnight, and we've had this immense amount of impact, changed the face of this planet within that second. How do I extend the same narrative on to yet other ideas? This was about elephants, hence burning of the ivory, the stockpiles. Thinking about how that connects to China. Incense clocks were what they used back in the day, so burning of incense. Then thinking about how the target swings back and forth just waiting for them to be culled down.

Moving that forward, how can we evolve this into a solution that's about having a rise in our energy consciousness? Not just moving to new energy economies, but also finding this deeper, spiritual connection to nature to see if we have the capacity to re-wild ourselves. Despite being disconnected, despite living in the cities that we live in, if there is an honest way in which we understand that the rhino is a part of who we are, that the elephant is a part of who we are, and we cannot live without them in this world with us. This particular campaign I ran in New York to raise funding. It was crowd sourced, so every time a donor contributed to this particular campaign, I would replace a graphically illustrated hand with an actual human hand. When I finished raising funding, I had all the human hands up there, and this is the power of us coming together. All of this resulted in me getting a billboard up in Times Square, on Broadway, between 46 and 47th, in partnership with loudSource, and March for Elephants, for a month. It ran twenty four seven, and I'm going to play the spot for you. Asher: The acousticscape for this particular animation was acquired from Elephant Listening Project, Katy Payne's work. This was an actual recording of a poaching incident in Gabon. You hear the shots being fired in the beginning, the elephants groaning, succumbing to those shots, and then you hear the poachers hacking into their faces, and the sound of that ... that's the axe hitting against the bone and also the tusk. You hear them groaning even after. That's because they're alive and conscious for this. You actually see elephants in Africa stumbling about with completely caved in faces because they've eaten in with an ax, and it's still alive. You have to wait for that elephant to fall before you can even handle what's happening with it. It's a pretty grisly trade. It's really brutal and bloody.

Oh, by the way, that particular campaign got over 1.5 million views. That's 1.5 million eyes that were reached, minds that were reached and hopefully changed in some way by that campaign. I did have a lot of people come up to me and ask me what ivory was which was a little shocking. It's the world we live in, so the need to educate, I cannot underscore that enough. If you know, transmit that knowledge. It has to happen now, use social media. I mean taking a selfie is not just about who we are today, but who we are has that power. Becoming that selfie means that you have a stand in this world, you have a place in this world, and therefore you need to speak up through it. Use yourself as a vessel.

Moving forward, it's not just about the megafauna that is going extinct because of our actions. It's also the habitat lost that's resulting in compromised living situations for all of these incredible animals. This particular campaign was illustrated in charcoal because the charcoal trade, I don't know how many of you know about this, is pretty rampant in African countries. They fell over 400,000 acres in just Tanzania to produce charcoal because it's the main energy source for most Tanzanian households. That's how they light their stoves. Because most Tanzanian households, the majority of the population lives off grid. This basically results in loss of habitat for the African wildlife. Cheetahs that are basically disintegrating before our very own eyes. These animals need a lot of space. They need the acres to survive.

I was also in the Serengeti recently working with Frankfurt Zoological Society very closely. I got the opportunity to talk to poachers, from the poachers, and also install this mural in the Frankfurt office in Seronera. The mural actually speaks to how I embed data into a particular artwork. Because the composition was not just about creating something beautiful, but about how much information I can embed in a given layout. In this particular case, I wanted to show the Serengeti highway coming up. I wanted to cast a light on demographic momentum in the upcoming years. Because if you look at the skyline that I've illustrated, you can actually see from 12 million the population when it peaks at Empire State, is going to be at 200 million just in Tanzania. Where is this population going to go? How is infrastructure going to develop in the coming years? How are we going to stop the wild from getting infringed, fenced in, and fragmented like it has everywhere else in the world? These are the questions I wake up to every day.

The reason why I do campaign after campaign, image after image, day in and day out, is because I want to change the one thing that I know will have the most impact in the world around me. And that's you. Thank you.

Asher Jay: Art as a Weapon

Artist and activist Asher Jay uses creative concepts and striking designs to underscore the dire consequences of wildlife trafficking in her fight against the illegal trade.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.